The present invention relates to a system for automatic control of devices, apparata and peripheral units for signal switching and processing, in particular for voice and/or data and/or images.
As is known, the need is currently increasingly felt to automate and mutually connect, by means of appropriate networks, apparata, devices and/or peripheral units used mainly, but not exclusively, in the office, so as to allow them to be more efficiently controlled and to allow a rapid exchange of the required information, simultaneously reducing the times required for the execution of the tasks to be performed by these apparata, as well as the manual interventions by the operators.
In particular, according to the current trends towards office automation, modern exchange systems are becoming increasingly widespread, integrating, besides the switching functions peculiar thereto, also further more advanced functions, for example for preprocessing phonic or speech data and storing particular data. As is known, furthermore, processing systems for controlling the office and the execution of various automated functions, such as for example automatic word processing or deadline control, may be present in the office itself. Finally, units for the control of apparata or devices installed locally or controlled in a remote manner, such as for example alarm detection units, actuators of various types (lighting, gate opening, conditioning, fire prevention, etc.) may be present.
To improve the management and allow an efficient and more extensive control of such different systems, suitable connection networks which allow the exchange of commands, information and data are therefore required. This, as is apparent, entails a hardly negligible burden for the interconnections, besides the fact that generally a simple interconnection can entail a scarcely efficient exploitation of the available apparata due to the present redundancies. Furthermore, in the case of apparata which are not already preset for connection or are not per se intrinsically capable of dialoging with the other apparata, a complicated adaptation thereof, which can be unjustified in some cases, can often be necessary.
To obviate this situation, a known solution provides the connection of telephone sets and peripherals to a processing unit in turn connected to a private telephone exchange (PABX) communicating with the outer environment. The intermediate processor handles the communication requests arriving from the exchange or from the connected sets, directly connecting the exchange with the telephone sets, in the case of phonic data transmission, and handling directly only the transmission of informatic data.
However, even this solution is not free from disadvantages, partly because it does not allow the complete control of the operations and of the processings which may be required, and partly because an efficient use of the apparata which allows the elimination of the redundancies and the attainment of high flexibility is still not obtained.